Women in Start-Up World Speak Up About Harassment

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Kristen Ablamsky, left, Claire Humphreys and Rachel Renock appeared in a New York Times article about the how women are treated in the venture capital industry.CreditCreditSasha Maslov for the New York Times

For three weeks early this summer, I had been competing with at least two other journalists to break a story about a little-known venture capitalist named Justin Caldbeck and his history of sexually harassing mostly Asian women in the start-up world. Investors and entrepreneurs had said that Mr. Caldbeck was a glaring example of endemic behavior in the industry, and the challenge would be to show how he was part of a broad, deeply ingrained problem.

Well, my friend Reed Albergotti of The Information got that scoop on June 22, and the women who talked drew overwhelmingly positive feedback. Mr. Caldbeck was excoriated online and his firm, Binary Capital, collapsed.

But Mr. Caldbeck was far from the only investor who was rumored to have harassed women, and I wondered whether he would be punished as an isolated case of bad behavior, only to have the industry go back to business as usual. Other investors, male and female, expressed similar worries. So I went back to my original sources and resumed our conversations. They began to refer me to other women who had stories of harassment, often with witnesses and private messages to back their claims. It felt like I had flipped over a healthy-looking log to find decay and bugs underneath. The story wasn’t just one man abusing his power; it was an entire problematic culture.

Over the next four days, I had lengthy, frank discussions with 26 entrepreneurs about the effects they might face if they came forward with their stories: bullying, ostracism and further harassment. I didn’t want to push people to take a risk that had such public consequences — and I didn’t have to. Circles of women who wanted to help appeared before me. People who weren’t willing to speak out knew someone who knew someone else who was. As the women spoke, their pace often quickened to a point where the words came in a rush. “I never thought my story would matter because my harasser is not famous,” one woman said. But the profile of the accused harasser was not the point. The systemic nature of the problem was.

I was impressed by the speed and power of these networks, and imagined how impactful they could be if they gained more overt power and visibility in the industry.

Patterns emerged, most glaringly the fact that many of the people who had stories to share were women of color, even though there are comparatively few female entrepreneurs who aren’t white. At the same time, more of the white women I spoke with were willing to go on the record and be photographed for the story. It was a sobering reflection of how much more risk founders of color believe they take on by being public about their experiences.

When I contacted the men, some of them denied the claims. Others impugned the character of their accusers, or tried cajoling, bullying and intimidation to get me to take them out of the story.

It was a swift lesson in what it’s like to cross powerful people, and why stories of harassment are so seldom shared in public. Venture capital is an unusually opaque world. The firms answer only to their tiny circle of investors, who know little about their day-to-day activities. They don’t have public shareholders or robust boards. Most firms do not have human resources departments. In this anachronistic environment, no wonder reputations are carefully burnished, and everyone in the system is incentivized to keep them intact.

But the power of speaking out has been evident. Last Friday, eight days after the Caldbeck revelations broke, we published our broad look at sexual harassment. Just three days after that, a well-known investor in our story, Dave McClure, resigned from his firm 500 Startups. My inboxes and voice mail are filled with women and men who want to talk about harassment, discrimination and other abuses of power that arise when knowledge and power are so unequally shared. I’ve seen people share the story on social media and others openly discuss their run-ins with harassment in comment threads. In the 13 years I’ve been a business reporter, I’ve not written a story that sparked so many emotional, cathartic conversations.

The backlash, however, has quietly begun, with men and women saying the increased scrutiny of investors’ behavior has led to a witch hunt. Bolstered by Mr. McClure’s resignation and by new stories of harassment, The Times published a follow-up article yesterday, and I intend to continue following the story. I’m guessing my future reporting will continue to take the measure of what is more important in startupland: entrepreneurs and employees, or the reputations of a coterie of powerful men.